Lioness Key

With this gift of 160 locks and keys, LUMA now has one of the largest and most diverse collections of such material in an American museum. Items range for a Roman key in the form of a lioness, through medieval warded and Renaissance "Wedding Chamber" keys, to intricately cut eighteenth and nineteenth-century keys. The collection also contains an example of a Bamana lock from Mali in western Africa and many examples of Chinese padlocks, the codes for which were composed of Chinese characters and sayings.